1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a method of and apparatus for reproducing data recorded on an optical information recording and reproducing medium such as an optical card.
2. Description of the Related Art
To reproduce data recorded on an optical information recording and reproducing medium, the data is read out by an optical information recording and reproducing apparatus, which transfers it to the host computer. Then, there follows data processing including data display on the screen, evaluation of data by the operator, and the printing out of data.
Referring to the flowchart in FIG. 8, the above-described data reproducing operation will be explained in detail.
When the program is started, a judgment is made to see if a reproduction request has occurred for the data recorded on the optical information recording and reproducing medium at step SP1. If it has, the optical information recording and reproducing apparatus reads out the data specified by the reproduction request, and transfers it to the host computer (step SP2).
Then, data processing including display on the screen is performed on the transferred data (step SP3). During the data processing, the program is judging whether or not there has occurred a reproduction request for the next data recorded on the medium or a program end request (step SP4).
The time required to read data from the optical information recording and reproducing medium is longer than that required to read data from a magnetic recording medium such as a hard disk or a floppy disk, or from other recording mediums. Because of this, there arose in the FIG. 8 conventional method a problem: it was impossible to shorten the time from when a data reproduction request has occurred to the optical information recording medium until the host computer begins to process the data. With the recent trend of dealing with increasingly large volumes of data such as image data, the shortening of the time required to retrieve the data from the optical information recording medium is a very important problem to be solved in the field of information processing.